2. More About Blu-Ray Players And Drives

As we reviewed the HD-DVD internal PC drives available in the preceding guide, we couldn't help but notice that such units are very hard to find in retail channels. This might suggest that they're beyond the reach of do-it-yourselfers - actually, the USB-attached Xbox 360 HD-DVD player also works with Windows PCs and costs only $200, so this turns out not to be a huge problem for desktop and notebook users. For many of the Blu-ray internal drives, the same phenomenon appears to hold; you can find drives - most notably from Plextor - readily on the open market, though they do cost $900 and up. While we couldn't yet find any of the LG combo drives for sale as we wrote this story, they should be available through major retailers and online outlets before the middle of 2007.

Another hidden benefit of the internal Blu-ray drives is that, in contrast to many standalone players, most of them can write to Blu-ray media as well as reading. With the ability to burn up to 25 GB of data per layer, and dual-layer capability in such drives, this makes Blu-ray media a pretty attractive option for backup and archival use, as well as for high-definition media playback. But again, we think prices will have to come down quite a bit.

The sections that follow will be devoted to the following items:

Standalone Blu-ray Players and Recorders: Players outnumber recorders by 3 to 1; so far, we've found only two of the latter for sale (at a huge whopping price, and only in Japan). This is where we cover the typical Blu-ray player that's likely to wind up in a home entertainment center or connected to an HDTV set. Blu-ray drives: This category includes all the units we could find that are designed to plug into a PC. Interestingly, all of these devices use the old PATA/ATAPI interface, rather than the newer and reputedly faster SATA interface. We found Plextor's offering most curious in this regard, because they already offer SATA models for conventional DVD burners. Combo units: These are the devices from LG that include laser pickups for CDs, conventional DVDs, HD-DVD and Blu-ray discs - a significant engineering feat if we ever did see one. (Other vendors are also working on this technology - we can't say which ones, though we can speculate more than idly that competition for this niche will begin before the end of 2007.) Right now, this includes one standalone player and one internal PC drive, so we cover both under a single heading. We also discuss other PC offerings that currently take the "go both ways" approach, by allowing buyers to configure units with both Blu-ray and HD-DVD drives. We also believe it's just a matter of time before these same vendors offer combo drives to buyers as well.